Weekly Art Practice - Week 3
Another week of having a good amount of time to devote to art. Huion tablet setup is reliable once more and now I don’t need to fight with making sure the pressure settings are working every time I turn it on.
Pigeons are the 3rd most common creature on our back patio so this is a creature a see regularly, unlike the pangolin. Love to see him, love when they awkwardly try to cling to the trellis.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
Day one wasn’t too intimidating. The hardest part is trying to not fall into the habits of drawing other birds. I drew a lot of birds of prey as a kid but pigeons have very little in common with raptors. So I find myself struggling with their longer necks and small beaks.
My pigeons ended up looking more like chickens.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
As usual I think I’m maybe spending too much time on these. I need to get better at setting a timer to limit myself to 2-3 minutes per reference or else I fall into doing more fully reference sketches.
Day 3 - Reference studies
It’s hard to resist just drawing pigeons in ball form. Love when they bury their head in their big neck and poof up. But I managed to resist and try a few other poses. I also tried to play around a bit with colour here but didn’t want that to be a big focus.
Simple start, standing in profile. Probably could have spent more time on this one but I tend to start fast and then slowly put more time into each reference practice piece.
The prettiest pigeon! While I have focused on rock doves for my reference I chose this one for it’s more unique pose and colours.
Fluff! Fluff! As much as I love them I struggle to make them round enough. Need to “push the pose” when the pose is “be a circle”.
Wings are still a challenge when you don’t want to draw 100 feathers but also don’t want to do an empty block shape.
Day 4 - Style studies
There are a lot of good stylized pigeons out there. I try to choose a variety of them to see some different approaches. Thankfully pigeons aren’t super complicated body-wise, but I feel like it’s still hard to capture their cute-ness.
Some nice simple guys here. They make the pigeon feel a little more fluid.
Reference: iStock
Such confident shapes! I feel like this one really helped nail down the simplified shapes going on.
Reference: Had to do a reverse Google search for this one. Piece by Tinysnails
I love when pigeons are balls. This one just felt very expressive with a very simple shape. I made the beak too large on mine but I still find it very cute. I don’t have the instinct to add the little shiver lines like on the top of this guy but it adds so much on the original.
Reference: From a collection of LINE stickers.
These guys have great personalities and good weird shapes. They’re a little outside my comfort style zone so definitely felt like a stretch.
Reference: This art is done by Anna Owen (seen in the image) but it looks like they’ve removed their Tumblr and Twitter from existence so all that remains are Tumblr reblogs and Pinterest steals. Tumblr post.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
I of course went for a round guy for my final test day. But I felt like this first one was a little too sketch-y to be my final piece for the week.
I decided to go for a more stylized one with proper line art and some sort of colour approach.
I found it weirdly difficult to make up my mind about soft colours and hard colours here. Ended up with the soft blend on the neck feathers and then the harder greys on the wings. I don’t love the combo but I didn’t like when the neck colours were hard edged. But otherwise, kind of pleased with this guy.
Conclusion
Now that I’ve done 3 weeks of animals I’m going to try working on some smaller focus things for a few weeks.
Time for a real artist challenge: Hands. Not sure how this one will go. But hoping to gain some hand confidence.
My pigeon Pinterest board with all my reference images can be found here.